Tools

Intel Updates Developer Tools

, June 23, 2009

Upgrades target parallelization and optimization

Intel has announced updates to a number of its compilers, libraries, and cluster tools. In general, the upgrades focus on parallel programming support and optimizations. The tools that are part of the upgrades and the new version numbers include:

With the upgrades, support is included for the new AVX and AES instructions. AVX, short for "Advanced Vector Extensions," is a 256-bit instruction set extension to SSE and is designed for applications that are floating-point intensive. AVX can improve performance on existing and new applications that lend themselves to largely vectorizable data sets. Wider vector data sets can process up to twice the throughput of 128-bit data sets. The AES (short for "Advanced Encryption Standard") instructions set is the U.S. Government standard for symmetric encryption. It includes four instructions to facilitate high-performance AES encryption and decryption, and two instructions support the AES key expansion procedure. The Intel Software Development Emulator implements both AVX and AES and can be downloaded here.

Among other enhancements, Intel Compilers 11.1 provides support for Eclipse CDT 5.0 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES11). Moreover, the Intel Parallel Debugger Extension added to Intel C++ Compiler, Professional Edition for Windows. This lets you step through a parallel region in serial mode during debug session, without rebuilding. You can also find data sharing violations and breakpoint when the occur, and identify re-entrant functions and, breakpoint when one is encountered. This works with OpenMP applications compiled with /debug:parallel from Intel C++ Compiler.

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